Artist's Statement

Imagine, if you will, an artist who paints abstract expressionist paintings for 40 years as a hobby … who, works professionally in graphics and professional writing all those years, spending the last 30 years designing and producing content for new media using Photoshop, Premier, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Corel Draw, and Maya. As you can imagine, that person will have the heart and soul of a painter and the skills of a digital art technician. Overlay that with a person who has been a professor, professional researcher, and problem solver for decades, and you have me.

I believe that the best art, like the best literature, will have a variety of interesting textures and flavors that change as the viewer examines it. I suggest that with great art, the longer the viewer looks the more the viewer sees, and the more interesting the work becomes. Moreover, the greatest artists often constrain themselves to only a few, hard problems (e.g., Kandinsky, Rothko, Motherwell, Kline, Hoffman), and that’s what makes their art unique.

Within that model, I shoot photos of failing infrastructure and corroded objects and reimagine them as abstract expressionist or surreal paintings, using their textures to guide me but painting with software, and not paint. I create triptychs made up of a variety of different photographs of entirely disparate objects. Sometimes it is possible for viewers to identify some of the objects I use, but often not so much.